“It’s a remarkable apparatus,” said the Officer to the Explorer
Kafka read “The Penal Colony” in a Munich gallery one evening in November, in front of some paintings by Van Dongen and Vlaminck, to an audience of about fifty people. He felt as cold as “the empty mouth of a stove.” A woman fainted during the reading; other people walked out, and still others complained it went on too long. The graphologist Max Pulver had the impression that “a faint odor of blood was spreading” through the room.
(Noted from Jürgen Born, 1979, Franz Kafka: Kritik und Rezeption zu seinen Lebzeiten, 1912-1924, p. 119.)
“You’ve seen that it is not easy to figure out the inscription with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.”